ETS (Emergency Telecommunications Services) have been implemented for telephone services including wire and wireless telephone services, in which in the event of an emergency a priority service is provided to particular users or groups of users over other users. IPS (Internet Priority Service) is being proposed as an analogue to ETS. The purpose of IPS is to support national security and emergency preparedness communications over the Internet during an emergency or an abnormal situation where the Internet is not able to support all communication demands. Such a situation could arise due to for example destruction of facilities, downing of cables, etc. in a disaster or terrorist attack or simply due to increase in traffic generated by people trying to find out what has happened to loved ones after the news of such an event is known. The design of the Internet is thought to be particularly robust against complete shut down and this makes the Internet well suited for authorized emergency communications.
One difference between telephone services and the Internet is that the former supports basically one type of service corresponding to phone calls while the Internet supports a plethora of services such as e-mail, instant messaging, voice over IP (Internet Protocol), and video conferencing for example. Phone calls each consume essentially the same amount of resources while different Internet application types consume widely different amounts of resources. For example, full motion and full resolution video conferencing makes use of far more bandwidth than instant messaging. Although the required resources depend greatly on the application type, generally the Internet infrastructure is not aware of what application a user is using. The Internet handles all IP packets uniformly. In an emergency situation, when resources are limited the current methods treat IP packets from a user that has invoked the IPS uniformly from one application type to another. This causes problems in that if the user is in a video conference and making use of a large bandwidth, other users invoking the IPS may not be able to communicate efficiently using for example e-mails which require far less bandwidth than video conferencing. Furthermore, if the user is in a video conference and has a higher priority than some other users that are attempting to send emergency related low bandwidth e-mails, these other users may be precluded for being able to send the low bandwidth e-mails due to priority being given to the user in the video conference. As such, current methods proposed for implementing IPS are inefficient in achieving the goal of emergency communication over the Internet.